-: Now, before we get into the nitty gritty
of how to use Midjourney, I wanna first zoom all the way out
and talk about generative AI
when it comes to photo generation from a wide perspective.
And it's really fascinating
how they've trained a model like Midjourney
to produce imagery from a text prompt.
Up until this point,
we've been working a lot more with text-based LLMs,
and now, we're getting more into the graphic design
and image creation section.
So the process for this type of LLM
is similar but different from something like GPT.
Now, there is the same process of having massive,
massive data sets that act as the training data
for the LLM.
In this case, it was millions and millions
and millions of different photos.
Now, for this model, it was trained on grouped keywords
with specific images.
So let's take the keyword apple.
The model was trained on thousands and thousands
and thousands of different colored apples
with different colored lighting
and different colored situations.
And noise and distortion, essentially,
was added on top of these training images.
And what ended up happening is that you would start
to get a very blurry, staticky image
that the model was then designed
to redraw from scratch.
So you start with a very clean image,
there's all this image distortion overlaid on it,
and the model's operation is to then redraw it,
so it gets back to a perfectly crisp and clean image.
Now, repeating that process
millions and millions and millions of times
over the course of, you know,
thousands of different types of photos of an apple per se,
made the model extremely good
at drawing an apple from scratch.
And this process repeated and repeated again and again.
On top of that,
there are essentially two different versions of the model.
There's the model that's creating the images
and trained on that process.
And then there's a part of the model
that's trained to critique
and to basically give the drawing model a score
as if it's a teacher grading a student's piece of artwork.
Now, this back and forth process
trained and fine-tuned both parts of this model
that essentially just made this model
an expert at generating images.
After the stage of the training process,
the next step was to go through supervised learning,
where now human intervention was made
to then critique the images
that were being created by Midjourney.
This was about the nuances
that the models themselves don't quite understand
around composition, around lighting,
around the little subtleties
that make an aesthetically-pleasing image.
So on top of that base layer of the model training itself
millions of times, there was this final stage
of supervised learning where a score was given
to the outputs by Midjourney
and basically training a whole another layer
of generating an aesthetically pleasing image.
So that is a very high level overview
of how generative AI creates images.
Now, in this section,
we're gonna go through the process
from the complete fundamentals,
all the way to generating incredibly complex
and specific prompts.
But before we do that, I do wanna hop over to Midjourney
and just show you really quick
how incredible this tool really is.
Okay, so here we are in Midjourney,
and like I mentioned,
I just wanna start off with something fun.
So I'm gonna type in /imagine,
and the prompt I'm gonna do is a Star Wars-style smartphone,
high definition, and ultra realistic.
And just like that, within a matter of seconds,
we've already generated something that, honestly,
a year ago, would've taken a graphic designer
hours, if not days, to refine.
And this is just simply with using the English language,
with just using a handful of words.
Now, this is why this is such an exciting time
to be living in
and that this is such an amazing tool to use.
So what I wanna do next is slightly change this prompt
where it's Star Wars-style smartwatch,
high definition and ultra realistic.
So now we have four different renditions
of a completely different subject
or object in our image just by changing one word,
but we're still getting the Star Wars look and feel.
And these are all really, really interesting.
What I'm going to do is hit U2
to make a more high-res version of our top right option.
So now I could download this full res,
but just for this little intro activity,
I wanna also do one more thing
and I'm gonna click Vary Region
and I'm gonna highlight the face of the watch.
I'm gonna delete this and we're gonna highlight right here,
and I'm gonna type in the prompt.
And don't worry, we're gonna dive deeply
into this process later in the chapter.
But I want to type in lush nature with vines and foliage,
'cause I'm really curious to see
what Midjourney is gonna do,
taking a more techie, modern, basically product photography
and slapping on something creative,
and really that takes a lot of finessing
to really merge this nature-based prompt
cleanly with a watch mockup without it looking cheesy.
(laughs) Cool.
So we have these different blended images.
I'm gonna upscale number three.
So I'm gonna hit U3 to upscale.
And then we're gonna download our high-res version.
And there we have our full resolution
Star Wars-style watch with lush nature,
intertwined and ingrained into the image,
just in a matter of seconds.
So I hope that this was a fun introduction
to AI art generation.
And like I said, we're gonna be diving
into all of the specifics in this chapter,
and I will see you in the next lesson.